Italy’s new health minister has sacked the entire board of the Higher Health Council, the country’s most important committee of medical-scientific experts who advise the government on health policy, in order to lay the groundwork to ban “dangerous vaccines”.

In a move on Monday night that shocked Italian scientists, Giulia Grillo, from the Five Star Movement – a vaccine-sceptic party that has received widespread support from Italians fed up with the previous government’s brutal mandatory vaccination schedule – said it was “time to give space to the new”.

“We are the #governmentofchange and, as I have already done with the appointments of the various organs and committees of the ministry, I have chosen to open the door to other deserving personalities,” Grillo wrote on Facebook.

The decision will mean the replacement of 30 board members, including the president, Roberta Siliquini, the head of the school of hygiene and preventive medicine at the University of Turin who was nominated in December 2017 by the former health minister Beatrice Lorenzin.

Grillo has also changed rules concerning the previous government’s mandatory child vaccine policy. Her party, which is governing in coalition with the far-right League, came to power pledging to reform a deeply unpopular policy brought in by the previous administration making 10 vaccines mandatory for all Italian children.

The previous government banned children from attending school unless they received the full schedule of Big Pharma sponsored vaccinations.

Critics of the previous government claimed Italy was at the forefront of a vaccination experiment conducted by a government corrupted by Big Pharma dollars. By allowing pharmaceutical companies to create new laws and force the full range of their products on the whole population against their consent, the Italian government was betraying their people.

However, upon taking office in June, Grillo immediately changed the rules and said parents could “self-certify” that their children had been vaccinated, instead of providing a doctor’s note, allowing many parents to avoid vaccinating their children.